vol. 2 episode 16
Greetings,
I’d like to welcome you to the first day of Fall in the Northern Hemisphere by telling you a story.
First, I want to say that when “reading” the skies, I find helpful to indeed read them. I like perceiving the planets as celestial intelligences, greater beings than we humans, off on jaunts from familiar to strange lands, chatting with one another as they go, offering loving or stern (or both!) opinions about what each other is doing. Because our lives are best lived and understood when we understand, share, and learn from our own personal stories, it makes sense to me that a technical grasp of what makes a good story helps with the practical application of astrology.
That’s why I assign the gods roles based upon their history as specific character actors. I also give them plotlines, lines to say, and place them in certain environments. I am mindful of how a love story feels different if it takes place on the Titanic compared to how it might if it were unfolding in a Parisian café post WWII. All of this comes from the techniques I learned from my teacher, Acytua-bhava Dasa.
So, back to our story.
As I stressed previously in a post to patron subscribers, as Venus picks her way through Virgo in the sky currently, she invites us to look in earnest at what is a mere simulacra of what we think is beautiful and true, versus what is everlastingly transcendent.
This is not an idle, dinner party prompt, but a considered question, pondered by our beauty queen Venus who, even before her trek through Virgo, has already made it through some potentially rough terrain.
Whatever she’s seen, it will certainly make her a great conversationalist at dinner parties, and a source of wisdom gained from her travels we might well heed, as Episode 16 gently but most certainly demonstrates.
In her most recent travels, Venus first found herself earlier this year near the terminus of Cancer, where the quiet Moon doesn’t rough anyone up, but when dark and inscrutable Pluto flashed his junk at our queen from across the platform in Capricorn, it probably left our lady with a case of the scaries. By the time Venus entered the Land of Leo and found herself looking across the way at Saturn, most likely, all the girl wanted to do was party and be pampered.
In response, Saturn might have said, “If that’s what you want, girlfriend, then here’re all the goodies you need to make a beautiful, even if false, impression – but I want those back, and when I come for them, I’m taking you with me.”
If she took that bait, then Venus shouldn’t be surprised when, just as he did for Faust, just as he did for Don Giovanni, even as he seems to be doing now for our former president who has a penchant for simulated gold and glitter, Saturn in his Grim Reaper guise will indeed come for what is his.
But not so fast. While in Virgo, Venus has been able to sneak in a stimulating and harmonious rendez-vous with the electrifying Uranus, the vacationing Venus’s guest back home in Taurus. Maybe this thrilling triste (conducted by way of a trine through the airwaves, a very Uranian activity!) restored her confidence in dealing with Saturn.
We won’t know for sure until after Venus has checked in with Neptune.
If we only consume pop astrology sources, then Venus in Virgo is a bitch. But for me, Venus in Virgo brings the kind of melancholy I remember feeling as a teenager who was lonely and at times even desperate and suicidal. That was at a time when thoughts of suicide were still considered so horribly taboo, you would never breathe a word of it to anyone, unlike today where there is even an expectation that at some point in our Modern Western Living lives, we will experience these feelings and will know to get help.
Decades later, I look back and see that Venus in Virgo experience for what it actually is: a longing to be whole and beautiful, to unite with what is perfect.
But of course, once something is perfect, it’s dead. Life is dynamic. Once a threshold is reached (Virgo is the sign of the thresher, after all), it must give way to what is new. That is the core of Saturn’s message.
While ancient doctrine describes Venus in Mercury’s home of Virgo as being where she is most homesick for her naturally voluptuous, receptive, and unified land of Taurus, soon she will be able to host her own dinner parties. If Venus in Virgo represents our secret desires to be loved, flaws and all, this might be the topic of conversation a week from now, when on Sept. 30, Venus leaves Virgo and enters her second homebase of Libra, the place where she leans on her more extroverted side.
But first, she will check in with Neptune, who might say to her in a soothing way, “If it makes you happy, I will sprinkle glitter dust upon the deceptions you’ve created from the goodies Saturn gave you; or, if you prefer, I will wash away the false bits from Saturn’s material treasures, and you can use those renewed and refreshed resources to ground a new dream you wish to build.”
Considering Venus’s perambulations around the Zodiac and back to Libra is occurring within the cycle of “walk your talk”, which is what Mars in Gemini about to retrograde indicates we need to do, as Elisabeth explained in Episode 14, we can imagine what Venus will choose, that is to say, what each of us might choose in the episodic unfolding of our own lives.
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In many ways, episode 16 is a very Venus in Virgo episode. Reunited again after about a month of being pulled in opposite directions for various reasons, Elisabeth and I not only hammer the corporate broadcast media for their neglect of what our country, and our world, actually needs coverage of, we also look at how Venus is reflecting to us the signal to pay attention to what is real, what is beautiful, what will carry our hopes from this exasperated and gasping end-of-an-era to the next.
Applying what is happening in the skies to what is happening here on earth, also known as mundane astrology, is what Elisabeth and I do in these podcasts. Except instead of my fictional accounts of what is happening between the gods, Elisabeth painstakingly documents each week, how the celestial conversations actually do play out.
It’s important to note, the news isn’t happening as it does because the gods have little puppet strings attached to our limbs. The news of the day is as it is thanks to our free will, and how we are choosing our own adventures individually and collectively. My stories of the gods are morality tales that I make up as a sort of mnemonic device for understanding how the archetypes of the universe might manifest in and through us.
My hope is that after you have a listen to this episode, the headlines Elisabeth and I – both former corporate media insiders – discuss and suggest are likely not true, are certainly deceptive, and/or created for the sake of draining your power and your dreams rather than enhancing it, you will gain insight into the kind of framework you must build for yourself in order to see the world as it truly is, rather than have your attention slotted according to someone else’s manipulation of you so they can vampirically feed off your power for their own gain.
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Back to our dinner with the gods…
We see that as Venus sets the table, Uranus and Saturn are preparing to square off from their current fixed stances in Taurus and Aquarius. We’ll get dinner and a show, a throw down of some kind!
And don’t forget, whereas Uranus is Venus’s guest in Taurus, Saturn is her most favored guest in the Halls of Libra, according to ancient doctrine. That leave the Sun, though welcome, not the one most high, literally so. Will that mean that Venus will focus our attention on what Saturn says must die, and that perhaps what we have “held on high” might not be what we want to continue to love and invest our time in, two very Venusian activities?
Will Venus, having made it through the gauntlet, now feel empowered because she has evaluated what is beautiful at a granular level, and is ready to decide for herself what is valuable, what is real, what is true – and best of all, what is meaningful to her – instead of letting anyone else, such as the corporate media, do it for her?
If you think of yourself as an avatar of Venus, you can ask yourself these same questions.
With all these celestial musical chairs, what masks might slip, what falsities crumble, what sudden revelations, might echo and reverberate in our next forecast?
When Venus invites you to dinner